YackTrack Will Be Shutting Down

It is with much regret that I must shut down YackTrack on August 15, 2012. There are a few reasons for this shutdown:

I really do not have time to work on YackTrack, and have not had much time for at least a year.

YackTrack has been limping along without many changes for a while and has not had the traction that is really needed.

YackTrack became an application that I did not have real passion for.

Obviously, that third point needs a little more explanation. When I started YackTrack, it was a blog comment and conversation tracking service only. So you would write a blog post, plug that URL into YackTrack and you would find the various social sites that the post was shared on and what comments were made. Social media monitoring was still a small niche at that time, so I decided to add basic keyword searches to YackTrack’s capabilities. This is where I steered the application wrong.

Social media monitoring is a good business and there can be good monetization options if your service gets traction. However, I do not have a lot passion for social media monitoring in its purest sense. Monitoring implies finding mentions of a keyword within minutes, notifying people of these mentions and eventually creating a dashboard of reports. Outside of finding blog comments, I took YackTrack outside of my interests and that is one of the worst things an entrepreneur can do.

Because of this loss of interest, YackTrack did not get the love and support that it needed. In addition, the whole social media monitoring space has matured and there are a ton of options both free and premium. For one of the best inexpensive options, take a look at Trackur and if that does not fit your usage you can find a tool in The Guide To 88 Social Media & Monitoring Tools.

With all of that said, YackTrack.com may be reborn in the future as a different application. I have a few ideas that have been brewing that are closer to my interests and the YackTrack name would still be a good fit.

Lastly, if someone is interested in purchasing YackTrack, meaning the code and the domain, please let me know at info@yacktrack.com.

Trackur is one of the many reasons I came to this decision. You have a business that caters towards the smaller businesses and doesn’t require a mortgage payment. That is the niche I was thinking of targeting, but one part-time person trying to compete against a team just doesn’t work well. Good luck with Trackur.